Official PS3 vs. Xbox 360 vs. N. Revolution

Maybe i did have as much time a Wvengence to type a reply up, I take my first comment back, your's isn't actually very long vengence.

 

the Game cube 2 "revolution" is set to destroy xbox 2 and ps3,
it has a technology never b4 used in any conventional toaster oven in the last century,
Equppied with bio-technicoloured-plasma-octopusses its graphics capabilities far exceed that of the atari 2600,
hiroyshumi namatakuri was omni cycling past a dead cat when he was inspired to design nintendo's new generation console, he said that "nintendo is a dead cat with digital hairballs all in one" and went on to say that "we are developing our new console not only entertain children and adults but also 99 year old fossils with games such as (bingo2005) and (lawnbowlsmania)" he also stated that nintendo would be upgrading the new system with a toilet bowl and a microwave so you never have to leave the room just nuke poo and play that my motto,

 

well it seems that i was illinformed if thats how you spell it,
nintendo arent calling their new system "revolution" rather "poocube"
PS3 is also going to be called "SonyEricsontrinity".............and xbox 2 will be called "billy's micro-placid" anyway im looking forward to Zelda and more resident evil's on the revolution poo cube, ps3 and xbox 2 should merge together and call themselves Sonybox....wow thats a good one, why thankyou, shhhh stop arguing with your self ..im not, i know...ok anyway.........im not on drugs but you might be if im not making sense to you, so...somebody give me a job in a game store i want to be a geek that sells people games and then gets lost in a world of hobbits and weird little demon people...my email is mongol@poocube.com
ring me on 1800poo if you need a good worker
much respect to gamenerds...ps dont eat beans

 

hello!!!

 

Where to start here...

First off, I will again say that you should go and read up on caching. This is a FUNDAMENTAL fact of basic computing that has been used for many years. Optical->Hard Drive->System RAM->L3(if available)->L2 Cache->L1 Cache. Basic information with the sole purpose of speeding up data access by puting faster components into the chain at each step. Let me spell this out again, it is a FUNDAMENTAL fact... It isn't speculation, it isn't conjecture, it IS. You might as well say that since they don't list the power requirements on the specs, it must not need power. Do your research and don't try to dismiss the lack of a HDD as standard won't have a poor effect on performance.

As for the HDD I chose, the 2.5" SCSI drives ARE new technology and you won't see anything much better in a years time. I just happened to choose that as a point of fairness since I was quoting specs from a SCSI Blue Ray drive.

Next, you sit there and say that the stats released by Sony are truth, but then say that the stats released by MS (of which MajorNelson is a principle member of the xbox team) aren't backed up at all. They are every bit as backed up and factual as everything that Sony released. Not my fault that they point out the 360 has 3 times the power. The numbers work out (that's what all the pretty graphs are for) and are based on factual components. IF you discount them, then don't bother quoting anything from Sony to me, because they are on equal footing to me (Not that I buy into either).

You might want to go back through and read the articles from Arstechnica regarding the 'general purpose computing' since that also encompasses things like A.I. and Physics calculations in games (Which I happen to think is relevant).

To re-interate your comment about using the official specs only... Since they don't list the AC requirements, I guess that there is no power supply (Didn't see it in the specs) so I guess it doesn't turn on?

I offer reasoned points of view backed by knowledge and experience in the subject matter. You only argument is that "damn, that is damaging to my stance so you can't use it". I only pointed out the HDD because it is the easiest flaw in the PS3 but I could easily put together facts and figures on other things. Shall we start on the "Work Smarter, not harder" idea that you think is so irrelevant?

 

I hate the PS2 controller it isnt comfortable. 4 shoulder buttons are not comfortable in my mind and on my hands. i was mad when i heard that the 360 controller will not have the black & white buttons.

if you dont know what the buttons do then how you can say which one is better.i played both and i always remember the black and white buttons a little kid can remember 2 buttons. So are we to believe you cant remember a black and white button. 1 time i was playing PS2 maddan 2002 and i couldnt use L1 and L2 at the same time and lose the game by 1 TD.

 

In one of your precious post you state that the PS3 will not use drive caching and that the xbox 360 will. Neither of those can be proven, it's especially dumb you think that because the PS3 doesn't come with an HDD it therefore isn't using it, that's all I'm truly against. With 256MB of XDR RAM at 3.2GHz(damn), why doesn't sony do this- Optical>Main Ram>L2>L1 and when you have a HDD and want to save things to it Optical>HDD>Main Ram>L2>L1, if you know all this fundamental crap, then maybe you'd know that the Optical IDE runs to the motherboard, then from there sony can design the board to send it through Main Ram (3.2GHz, i can't get over that, must be $$$), then conatain a program or user variable to decide to record to HDD or go straight through. Damn, Sony is smarter than you think, wtf you think that these console have to run like a damn modern computer, they're designed to do a few jobs and skipping the HDD and moving through the m b to XDR would be way fusking faster. Did you ever think of that, did you ever think of how a revolutionary console would work, it's called cutting the crap. I really hope xbox 360 does the same thing, even though it'd be moving it to only 512MB 700MHZ GDDR3 RAM. And yes I know, PS3's GDDR3 RAM is 700MHz too, if it's going to graphics it wil be just as fast as xbox 360 at that stage, but if optical>Main RAM>HDD> it will be faster (saving .iso or music etc. to optional HDD). Optical>HDD>Sys RAM>L2>L1 would be a dumb method of moving information in a console, and would not be faster than long developed method I assume Sony wil have designed in the mother board, this would explain why the HDD is optional. WTF do you think the PS2 does without a HDD. With that speed of RAM and L2 L1 caching. Hard drive caching become insignificant. Now it's your turn to your homework, don't base it off what you CS degree has taught you about desktop or workstation (do you do server boards?) computers.

That whole AC thing is kind of a bad example. Because it is not listed in specs doesn't mean it is non-existent on the final machine, but if it isn't, that doesn't mean it will either. In the end for all we know Sony could include a 5GB HDD for shits and giggles to stop whiners like you. Maybe no HDD or maybe a 100GB HDD, only time or an updated fact sheet will tell.

I stoped reading the major nelson thing after the first page and a half. What he/she failed to mention or calculate was that each of the 7 operating SPEs perform a command at once each at 3.2GHz. The Xbox 360's 3 cores performs 6 (two hardware threads per core). The PS3's processor (not to mention each SPE has it's own 256KB SRAM, SCORE!!) stil comes out ahead, thus the superior total floating point performance. Where in the hell major nelson comes up with that bs is beyond me. He/she even fails to mention the hardware threads making the xbox 360's computing capabilities near the 7 SPE's.

Both companies are not going to cache to drive, that would be really stupid in a console. The PS3's slightly superior CPU and much better Main Ram and equivalent GDDR3 RAM, going into a 550MHz GPU instead of ATI's 500MHz (that's a fair gap), will set it far beyond the hardware capabilities of xbox 360. Thus the superior 218 GFLOPS CPU and the overall superior 2 TFLOPS system performance.

I did some serious HWork on console design and how they move data versus how desktops operate. Drive caching is definitly not going to be used by Sony, because 1 it's slower and 2 now you don't need a HDD. With such advanced opticals and system bandwidth and 512MB of RAM, I now understand how Sony is going to do it, and why drive caching would be foolish for both Sony and MS.

 

Heh, this is a just a bit of playful fun, no offense meant. You have a CS degree, you make a lot of money a year, and you still don't know how to use the edit button? =D

Just a joke... feel free to flame me if you want.

Your posts are as long as Wvengence's.

 

First off, I caution you on the use of insults/profanity here as Flip has banned people already and I'd hate to lose a verbal sparing partner.

Second, to add a bit on info about my background. I work in high end servers and SAN's (Mainly HP for those interested) which stands for Storage Area Networks if you care for some research. I happen to know a bit about moving data around.

Third, while I do realize that consoles aren't the same as a PC, the general technology used on them is. The processors are based on new desktop processors (although modified), the RAM is based on PC RAM (although modified), the GPU's are based on PC GPU's (Although modified, the Hard Drive is based upon PC HDD's (Although modified)... but in the end, it all comes down to moving data (in one form or another) between different points.

Now, to touch upon the PS2. The PS2 pulled things from the DVD into RAM, yes. However, most anyone who put a HDD into a PS2 and loaded games onto it will tell you that the games ran better and smoother than from the DVD. There is a reason for that.

"WTF do you think the PS2 does without a HDD" I know that the processor got bottlenecked, reducing the performance of the console massively (but it was more the system RAM issues that killed it...)

" why doesn't sony do this- Optical>Main Ram>L2>L1 and when you have a HDD and want to save things to it Optical>HDD>Main Ram>L2>L1" Simple, your XDR Ram is running 3.2 Ghz (Although it communicates with everything else at a slower rate) it means that your ram is capable of performing 3200000000 actions per second.

-A hard drive (Average) has approx 8ms seek time, meaning that it takes 8 milliseconds (100/8=125 actions per second)to answer a request for data. This means if the RAM requests data from the HDD, it will wait 25.6 (3.2 billion/125) million actions while it waits for the HDD to answer. When it answers the drive can then transfer data at upto 133MB/second (Based on UIDE) but lets say 80MB/second as a realistic option.

-A DVD has approx 160 (average) Seek time (1000/160=6.25 actions per second). This means when the RAM requests data from a DVD, it then has to wait for 512 million actions before it can receive a response and transfers up to 11MB/second.

This means that the HDD answers the RAM 20 times faster than a DVD and transfers data 7.3 times faster (average). Please note that these figures account for having a RAM cache on both the DVD and HDD (which is a standard feature) used to speed up access.

Hopefully you can now begin to appreciate why a HDD is useful in speeding up data access (although this is a basic example). The only way to count this effect is to put something with a faster access in between but as the access speeds increase, so does the price. This is why L2 cache (which is much faster than system RAM, even XDR) is limited in size and L1 (which is faster still) is smaller still. Sony 'COULD' put something else in between to take the burden, but this would be RAM, which would be more expensive than a HDD so they might as well just include the HDD for extra functionality.

Now, if there isn't a HDD included with the console by default, developers will NOT write games to use it. The PS2 is a wonderful example of this, since the ONLY game that was programmed to use the HDD was FFXI which came on the drive. The point of consoles is that you have a set hardware platform with known technology that allows you to program games far better than for the wide variety of PC platforms. If they don't know that a HDD will be there, they won't use it because it might not be there.

The reason why MS included a 20GB drive is for this very reason. They originally planned to have a basic version, then a deluxe with a HDD but developers told them that if it wasn't standard, they wouldn't use it. They knew that they couldn't get the type of performance they wanted otherwise and revised the specs to include a 20GB drive.

To address your comments on the Cell. (I will again point out that you should read the arstechnica articles because it might help understanding the processors better) I agree that the Cell can process 7 threads at once, however, the SPE's are controlled by the ONE PPE, which can only handle 2 threads at a time. This means that while it can work on 7 threads at once, it can only move 2 threads to the rest of the system through the PPE per cycle. Meanwhile the 360 can work on and move 6 threads per cycle. So the Cell can Process more (117%) than the 360, the 360 can deliver more processes to the system (300%). Also, I believe that the 360 PPE's can deliver 256 GFLOPS (maybe a bit more) by themselves, which is certainly better than the 218 you quoted for Sony (which claims that the RSX can manage 1.8 TFLOPS alone). Yes, the SPE's have 256k per, but then all 7 of them still have to go through the 512K L2 cache on the PPE to access main memory. I highly recommend that you understand what that means before you start down this tangent.


"The PS3's slightly superior CPU and much better Main Ram and equivalent GDDR3 RAM, going into a 550MHz GPU instead of ATI's 500MHz (that's a fair gap), will set it far beyond the hardware capabilities of xbox 360." Let's not forget that the ATI GPU has the unified architecture (another debate, no doubt) and 48 pipelines (Which Sony might have 32 in the RSX (That's a fair gap) but the G70 it's based on uses 24) and has the embedded RAM on the GPU. Before you put your foot in your mouth hear, look up some stats on how much of a performance hit there is implementing MSAA x4, Z buffer & stencil buffer on graphics. Once you have the #'s, you will have a better appreciation of what the EDRAM does. That comes under the "work smarter, not harder" portion of things however.

"I did some serious HWork on console design and how they move data versus how desktops operate. Drive caching is definitly not going to be used by Sony, because 1 it's slower and 2 now you don't need a HDD. With such advanced opticals and system bandwidth and 512MB of RAM, I now understand how Sony is going to do it, and why drive caching would be foolish for both Sony and MS." Go back and redo your HWork, you just waisted that time of your life...

Toiletman: Your right, I should have used the edit button. My bad.

PS. Sorry for the long post, but it's obvious that I have to spell out basic things for some people.

 

WVengence why is MS using 20GB HD and not a better one? Is it to save money?
Will MS lower the price of the x box360 when the PS3? should they?

 

Props to WVengence, very well writen.

Anyway, we are now at the 3+ Ghz mark for cpu's, if you didn't relize that the origional xbox and ps2 were using way slower cpus and still are producing incredable outputs you will relize that it doesn't matter about the hardware (too much, yes it does matter) once you get to this level.

Yes, so far the ps2 has a better processer, this means it can perform tasks slightly faster, also means that it can handle more at any given point in time.

As for the DVD's, a 200gig dvd, thats so unnecessary, most people don't have more than 80 gigs in their computers lol, why so much on a dvd. I'm not too sure about the average size of a ps2 game but the xbox is right about 3 gigs, because there are a few really big games, for instance pgr2, beautiful game, and well programmed. Most computer games arn't even close to 2 gigs. My whole valve folder on my computer is only 11.2 gigs. This has Half life 2, Day of Defeat, counter strike, counter strike source, and many more. If you want to know then here is a link to a image of my steam list.
http://home.comcast.net/~jayd1056/games.jpg


which leads me to this, we are at the point to where it is going to come down to the programmers now, i'm sure that whoever has the best is going to win.

My use of the word "win" is rather out of place here, both consoles are amazing, who gives a flying f*** which is slightly better.

this could come down to the online market and the acessery market. Microsoft has a way better knowledge of the online market, and sony is just getting into it, they barly have their foot in the door with only a handful of games online, microsoft has a crapload of titles (when i say microsoft i mean the xbox, microsoft didn't deveolope thoes titles, doesn't get picky with me please).

final statement, it's going to comedown to the programmers.

whats the point in having a dual core 64 bit processer with 2 gigz of ram if your only running the equivalent of pong which needs like, a 10mhz processer and about 5 kb or ram (sorry for not knowning exactly what is needed to run pong, i might be off a little).

edit- unless you want to run pong 5 billion times faster than it should be run, and you are having the computer play against itself.

Jay

 

Rap: I would guess that it's because the 20GB 2.5" drives are probably the smallest drive still in production and easily available.

Since there have already been pictures that show a 40GB drive, there is no doubt that we will see additional sizes available for those that want it, but atleast there is one.

 

WVengence, do you have to write a novel everytime you speak.

Can't please everyone!

And when is everyone going to realize that by looking at the spec's that both consoles will be fairly close, and the battle will be fought out in the games and multiplayer arena. Not the spec list!

 

I love how everyone is fighting the specs war. Lets all look at it from a marketing point of view.

Each company has a goal in mind, one they are bringing to the market to hopefully bring to the bank. Now if this goal is not met, then they will have failed and will most likely fail in the next round of consoles due to market support.

Microsofts idea is to come out first. Do they care about being the best? No, not the best, but good enough will suffice for them, they are first. They are trying to compete with....

Sony who is marketing to be the best. It is Sony's goal to have the most powerful system on the market. They for some odd reason felt that they will be best suited if they have the most powerful system.

Nintendo is niche marketing, they want new gamers (its a fundamentally bad idea to look for new customers rather than make the old customers happy) and trying to get people hooked on old games.

Now... lets make statements based on marketing ideas.



Sony says "we will be the strongest system"
Microsoft doesnt deny this....

MS.Fanboy says "Microsoft is a stronger system"

This is the equivalent of----

Microsoft says "We will be out in 2005"
Sony doesnt deny this....

S.Fanboy says "PS3 will be out first!!"

This is not rational... just like saying the 360 will be a stronger system than the PS3. Its coming out six months before.... the PS3 has to be better or they lose.

Ok... so as far as marketing goes if they systems plan on suceeding the next round they [bold]MUST[/bold] give what they are each promissing from a marketing point of view.


Its like if you bought a television that said it gets 200 channels and you buy it and get 50. Nobody will buy it because the marketing plan was a complete lie.

You guys can argue yourselves to death talking specs and performance... but wait and watch see what happens.

Oh yeah.. and for those that believe Sony is an evil liar that doesnt live up to their word... any Sony product that didn't live up, sunk. EG the PS2 HDD. The PS2 when released was the best system out there... XBOX just had an extra year to play with before it came out, basically the opposite of what happened last round.


So from a marketing standpoint that is what should happen. Might I also add that the marketing is happening now, and is a reality. Where as the specs and performance of any next gen system are yet to be seen. (I remind you they werent playing real 360s at E3... they were Macs) So well see the specs... but the marketing strategies should give the real tell tale signs.

 

Ok... at first I hated the PS3 controller.. so big and ugly. I figured it was massive to have handles like it did, that was going to be uncomfortable. Now seeing this, i am impressed. I dont really care what other people think, it still looks like it will fit well, and doesnt stray far from the original design.



What do you guys think? Id like to hear from people that are getting the PS3 first...

I like it.

 

If you put in a game and wnat to play it, but the game .iso or files aren't on the HDD, then the HDD has to wait for optical to send it there first then the HDD can send it onward. So if the HDD has to wait for the optical then move to RAM. Why not skip HDD and move straight from optical to RAM, this will be faster and is what they're doing. If you broke the encryption and ripped your game or DVD on the HDD then it will work way faster off HDD than optical. But most users are just going to pop in a BD and play. This is just how I looked at it, and makes sense. Not everyone will mod or hack the security so you can ripped the disc on HDD.

You don't know for sure about the spec that the cell will include only one PPE. That would be very dumb, and is highly unlikely, and almost impossible. www.playtaion.us.com has a the spec sheet, and does not mention this fact for the cell that will be made only for the PS3. The spec sheet does however have an interesting off note, "one VMX vector unit per core", what does this mean? It either means that each of the 7 SPEs perform a command at once, or the cell will have multiple cores containing multiple SPEs. Anyway, your comparison of the CPUs using the single PPE with two threads, is not sufficiently backed and quite frankly, would make no sense to include such insane processor capabilities with 7 SPEs and then not use them all at once. I would place my life as a bet against the single PPE idea(not backed by official spec, remember, you can't use other cells because they are going to be very different, IBM's run at a bitchin 4.6GHz, 3.2 is spec for the PS3's)

EDRAM is sweet, I'll readily admit that, but 10MB isn't affecting my thoughts on MS's "working smarter, not harder", mostly because it isn't working that much smarter yet.

Keep it coming Wvengence, for real, my goal isn't to prove one better than the other, but to understand which will come out ahead. I could care less which, I just am interested, so far you've earned a hell of alot of respect from me. Onward with spec sheet only please, or at least given fact that can be backed up decently...

 

Well someone in this Thread has a point if the PS3 dosen't come with a HD it will suck to be modded, I AGREE!!!,My current system (XBOX with Xececter 3 CE And BIOS and AVALAUNCH and XBMC,250 GB Maxtor HD), like I said Blu-rat is the biggest scam Sony did since the Beta Blow and the Memory Dildo.

 

the PS3 controllers look to much like Boomerang no more like a U it look more uncomfortable it has very small buttons and it looks like it doesnt fit the human hand. i was the 1st person to us the PS3 controllers just look at this

that hand in the pic was most likely a japanese man holding it what do i mean japanese are short then american with smaller hands.

 

How much longer do u think this thread will go on?

 

think it will make it to 1000+ post